Multi-channel fraud protection for card issuers with flexible solutions for fighting against card-not-present fraud, counterfeit card use, managing data breaches and protecting cross-border transactions. Fractals from NCR is one of the most powerful fraud detection and prevention solutions available, designed to help you protect all your customers’ accounts in a fast-changing fraud environment.

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Product Summary

FRACTALS - Smart solutions for fighting fraud

“Authentic and Fractals are modern, open products which come with powerful out-of-the-box functionality.”

– Cal (Israel Credit Cards Ltd.)

Staying ahead of global fraud is a never-ending battle. As the diverse market for electronic payments grows so does the potential for damaging fraud attacks.

Innovation in payments is matched by innovation among fraudsters who constantly update their methods to maximize their profits. Fraud is now an international business and criminal gangs seek out the weakest targets for the easiest returns.

Every day, banks, payment processors and merchants protect their customers, their reputation and their bottom line from fraud using Fractals from NCR.

Flexible and efficient fraud detection

Fractals is a smart, self-learning fraud detection and prevention solution. It combines self-learning analytical models with user-defined rules to give you an exceptionally high fraud detection rate with a low false positive ratio. Flexible, scalable and easily configurable, it is suitable for organizations of any size.

Fractals gives you enterprise-level fraud detection. With Fractals you can protect all channels, all accounts and all payment types from a single platform. You can monitor both card-present and card-not-present transactions. You can also assess individual transactions as well as historical and aggregated behaviour across multiple accounts or groups of accounts.

Fractals enables you to enrich your fraud screening capabilities by incorporating data from the widest possible range of sources. In addition to the usual transactional information, you can include data from other internal systems and fraud-scoring models. Fractals also lets you take advantage of information provided by specialist third parties, so you can validate the device, IP address and geo-location of the payment source.

When deployed with Authentic or other suitable payments processing engines, Fractals enables real-time, in-flight fraud blocking. It also has near real-time and batch detection modes.

You can also augment Fractals’ fraud prevention capability by deploying MySpend from NCR, which allows your customers to provide fast confirmation of fraudulent activity from their mobile phones. Fractals also uses Message Mapper, and its simple point-and-click configuration, to manage integration with internal or external systems.

Smart, self-learning strategies

Fractals comprises three broad components.

Fractals Adaptive Classification Engine

Fractals’ high fraud detection rate is made possible by its use of next-generation analytics. Using Bayesian statistical analysis and proprietary inference techniques, the Adaptive Classification Engine provides fully automated, intelligent fraud detection. The Adaptive Classification Engine can detect even the most subtle changes in fraud trends, enabling it to identify new fraud types as soon as they are activated and prevent them spreading further.

The Adaptive Classification Engine’s fraud model includes strategies that self-adjust as transactions are tagged as fraudulent, which enables it to learn new fraud patterns as they appear.

By constantly updating themselves, these self-learning models enable Fractals to keep up with even the most innovative of fraudsters, while minimising input the required from your fraud analysts. The high rates of fraud detection achieved by the Adaptive Classification Engine also make you less dependent on the Rules Engine.

Fractals Rules Engine

The Fractals rules engine enables you to define the rules which are used to score each transaction and determine whether it should be authorized, declined or reviewed.

You access the rules engine through a browser-based interface and define, create, test, evaluate and deploy rules without coding or programming. Fractals’ graphical rule workbench also makes it easy to express complex and varied rules, and update them rapidly in response to changing threats. You can deploy new or updated rules with immediate effect or schedule them to be activated at a set time.

Post-scoring actions allow you to define automatic responses according to the outcome of the Adaptive Classification Engine or rules engine. If ‘in flight’ fraud prevention is needed, Fractals can return the appropriate response to the requesting system. Alternatively, Fractals can trigger an SMS message to be sent to your customers, or change the account status in your card management system to block further transactions.

Alert Management

Once the Adaptive Classification Engine or the rules engine has identified a suspicious transaction, Fractals gives your fraud analysts the following support:

Alert queue management – a flexible, configurable mechanism for queuing alerts. Alerts can be grouped by common fraud score features, such as product type or transaction amount. Each analyst’s queue can be linked to one or more alert groups, which provides a high degree of configurability to meet operational needs.

“What is really different with Fractals is that we can manage our fraud risk exposure across mobile POS, e-commerce, and traditional retail channels with a single system.”

– North American Bancard

FRACTALS - Rules Engine

The Fractals Rules Engine helps you tackle transaction fraud across your entire enterprise: any channel, any account, any payment type—all from a single platform.

Staying ahead of global fraud is a never-ending battle. As the market for electronic payments becomes bigger and more diverse so do the chances of a damaging fraud attack.

Around the world, issuers, acquirers, merchants, processors and PSPs rely on Fractals for intelligent fraud detection and prevention. Its distinctive combination of user-defined rules and self-learning analytical models provide both exceptionally high levels of fraud detection and low rates of false positives.

Every day, businesses of all sizes protect their customers, their reputation and their bottom line from fraud using Fractals from NCR.

Fractals Rules Engine

Using the Fractals Rules Engine keeps you in control of your fraud management strategy. You choose the tactics and the rules you wish to use, and adjust them according to the fraud types that your customers face every day.

The Fractals Rules Engine enables you to define the rules which are used to score each transaction, in real time, and to determine whether it should be authorized, declined or reviewed. The Fractals Rules Engine has been designed to make it easy to define, create, test and deploy rules so there is no need for coding skills and no need to re-program the core solution.

Fractals enables you to enrich your fraud screening capabilities by incorporating data from the widest possible range of sources. In addition to the usual transactional information, you can include data from other internal systems and fraud-scoring models. The Fractals Rules Engine, when paired with the Fraud Integration Hub also lets you take advantage of information provided by specialist third parties, so you can validate the device, IP address and geo-location of the payment source.

If a transaction generates an alert, the Fractals Rules Engine will give your fraud analysts full details of which rules have been triggered and why. That way they can continuously improve their understanding of fraud patterns, and develop more effective counter-measures.

Fractals’ detailed, granular and targeted rules also give your analysts the freedom work more effectively and more intuitively. No longer constrained by technology, they can deploy their hard-won expertise as they see fit.

The Fractals Rules Engine gives you a secure, functionally-rich fraud detection framework. With Fractals in place, you can apply your own specialized fraud countermeasures from day one, without the challenge of learning to code a new system. Fractals can be populated with a full set of rules in the time it takes most other system’s users to type and code a few rules, enabling them to spend more time analyzing fraud and speaking to customers.

Comprehensive, configurable rules

With its browser-based user interface and ‘pointand-click’ functionality, Fractals enables you to implement simple and complex rules quickly and easily without coding or programming. Business users can copy or edit existing rules for fast and easy updates, and create ‘authorization lists’, which control who is allowed to transact with your organization and how.

You can deploy new or updated rules with immediate effect or schedule them to be activated at a set time. Once you have a created a rule in Fractals, it is stored in a library where it can be easily activated, deactivated and scheduled. Fractals automatically checks for similarities between your new and existing rules to avoid duplication, and allows you to test new rules against recent historical data so you can see the likely impact on the system—so you can prevent the arrival of a flood of alerted or declined transactions.

The Fractals Rules Engine also logs all maintenance and update activity for security and audits.

The Fractals Rules Engine includes the following types of rules:

Express Rules - Fractals’ Express Rules instantly counter specific and rapidly evolving fraud threats. Simple rules that can be deployed in seconds, we have designed them for use in emergencies such as applying an immediate and short-term block on transactions from a particular merchant or country.

Advanced User Rules - User rules act on the data present in a sequence of events such as amount or country code, or the profile functions which are computed across a sequences of transactions. Fractals offers a wide range of profile functions, such as the moving average of ATM withdrawals or the daily total of all transactions on an account. Every time a transaction is processed, Fractals automatically updates the profiles for each card or account.

Enterprise Rules - Enterprise rules monitor behavior at an aggregate level to give you cross-account fraud prevention. You can configure enterprise rules to monitor behavior across the main and all secondary account holders, for example, or to monitor the aggregate transaction volumes from a group of merchants over a specific period.

Common Point of Purchase Rules - These are the rules that enable you to identify when a card has been used at a known point of compromise and is subsequently being used suspiciously.

In addition, the Fractals Rules Engine provides a number of advanced tools that enable you to express complex scenarios in a compact and easily understood form. They significantly reduce the number of rules that are typically required and make it easy and efficient to create and maintain rules. This includes tools that reduce rule duplication by taking into account variations in spending patterns across specific groups of accounts or customers and allowing you to set varying trigger thresholds accordingly.

Fractals Rules at a glance

Monitors transactions from any channel, for any card or account, with any payment type

By 2025, purchase volume for goods and services by cards is expected to reach $54.9 Trillion1 (USD). Transaction volume is increasing and moving to different payment devices and channels. Card fraud is rising, especially card-not-present (CNP) fraud and your financial institution needs a flexible and responsive Fraud Module to protect your reputation and your customers.

NCR’s Issuer Fraud Module - Fractals

Fractals provides financial institutions with protection for accounts, transactions and payment channels in real- time, near real-time, and batch detection capabilities for the detection of fraudulent transactions.

As adoption of the EMV standard re-focuses fraudster activity, Fractals protects card-not present (CNP) and cross-border payments while continuing to minimize losses from counterfeit or stolen cards used in face-to-face transactions. Your financial institution can block fraudulent transactions in-flight and in real time to stop fraud early in the authorization cycle and minimize losses and enhance the customer experience. Fractals is adaptable and agile and uses the combination of machine-learning analytics and user-specified rules to prevent fraud.

Fractals is designed so that you can set up and validate your chosen rules in seconds and provides the ability to set-up multi-level rules to adapt your existing risk policies, and implement new risk policies when you need to.

Fractals Solution Module Components

Fraud Integration Hub (FIH) - A central integration hub, the FIH integrates with your existing internal systems and external data services to enrich the log-on or transaction data. The FIH enables you to set up fraud detection rules based on data from a variety of external sources, such as IP Location and Type.

Adaptive Classificaton Engine (ACE) - ACE provides financial institutions with a powerful tool for executing decisions in real-time as particular patterns arise in the behavior activity in the online and mobile channels using Bayesian statistical techniques.

Dynamic Rules Engine - Point & click, configurable rules builder that is browser based and enables the financial institution to define the rules used to determine if additional information is needed or if the activity is suspicious.